Chapter 19 Chapter Nineteen

I have succeeded in sketching the general conditions of Sebastian's life in 1935, the last year of his life.He died in early 1936, and when I looked at the number "1936," I couldn't help thinking that there was a mysterious similarity between a person and the date of his death.Sebastian Knight, died in 1936... It seems to me that the date is a reflection of his name in a rippling pool of water.Something in the arc of the last three numbers "936" reminds me of the sinuous contours of Sebastian's personality... As I have often struggled to do in the course of writing this book, I have struggled to express An idea that might interest him...if I miss even a shadow of his thought somewhere in the book, or if I sometimes take a wrong turn in his private labyrinth at the mercy of unconscious mental activity bend, then my book is clumsy and a failure.

"Suspicious Periwinkle" came out in the spring of 1935, coinciding with Sebastian's last attempt to see Nina.When a greasy-faced thug sent by Nina told him that Nina wanted to get rid of him completely, he returned to London and stayed there for two months; A pathetic way to deal with loneliness.His thin, sad, silent figure was seen here and there, always with a scarf around his neck, even in the warmest dining-rooms.He was always absent-minded, and always tactfully refused to talk to others; his frequent wanderings away from parties, or being caught engrossed in jigsaw puzzles in the nursery, exasperated the hostesses.One day, near Charing Cross Road, Helen Pratt saw Claire go into a bookshop, and a few seconds later, as she continued on, she met Sebastian.Sebastian blushed slightly when he shook hands with Miss Pratt, and accompanied her to the subway station.Helen Pratt was glad that Sebastian didn't show up a minute earlier, and even more fortunate that he didn't mention the past.Instead he told her a complicated story about how two men had blackmailed him at the poker table the night before.

"Nice to meet you," Sebastian said, parting from her, "I guess I'll just buy it here." "What?" asked Miss Pratt. "I was going to [he named the bookstore], but I knew I could get what I wanted at this kiosk." Sebastian often went to concerts, watched plays, and often drank hot milk in the small coffee kiosk with taxi drivers in the middle of the night.There is one movie, it is said, that he saw three times—a completely dull movie called The Enchanted Garden.Two months after his death, and a few days after I found out who Mrs. Lecerf really was, I found a French cinema showing that film, and I sat there until the end, with the sole purpose of Find out why the movie appealed to him so much.Halfway through the film, the background shifts to the Riviera, and the screen flashes a shot of swimmers basking in the sun. Is there Nina among them?Was that bare shoulder hers?I think there's a girl looking back at the camera that looks a lot like her, but sunscreen, tanned skin, and eye shadow are all good camouflage to make a fleeting face unrecognizable.Sebastian was very ill for a week in August, but he refused to stay in bed as Dr. Oates had ordered.In September he went to visit some people in the country: he didn't know them very well; they invited him only out of politeness, because he had casually said that he had seen photographs of their house in Tatter magazine.He had been hanging out in all the cold houses all week, and the other guests knew each other and were close.Then, one morning, he walked the ten miles to the station and slipped back into town without even his evening coat and toiletry bag.He had lunched with Sheldon at Sheldon's club in early November, and he was so reticent that his friends could hardly understand why he had come.Then there is a blank.Sebastian has obviously gone abroad, but I don't believe he has definite plans to see Nina again, although his uneasiness may be based on a vague desire to see her.

In the winter of 1935, I was in Marseilles most of the time to manage our company's business.In mid-January, 1936, I received a letter from Sebastian.It was strange that the letter was written in Russian. "You know, I'm in Paris now, and I'm going to stay [zasstrianoo] for a while. If you can come, come here; if you can't, I won't be angry; but it might be better if you come. Now I feel I was bored [osskomina] because of several troublesome things, especially because of the pattern of the snake skin [vypolziny] that I shed, so I now find poetic solace in things that are obvious and common, because of this For that reason I have overlooked them in the course of my life. For example, I want to ask you what you have been doing all these years, and I want to tell you about myself: I hope you do better than me. Recently I I used to see the old doctor Stalov, who used to treat maman (that's what Sebastian called my mother). I met him one night in the street, and I had to sit in a car parked on the street. he seems to think that I have been doing nothing in paris since maman's death, and I agree with his generalization of my expatriate situation, because [eeboh] it seems to me that any explanation It's all too complicated. One day you'll stumble upon some papers, and you'll have to burn them right away; sure, they've heard the voice of [a word or two is illegible, is it Dot chetu?], but now they have to Burned at the stake. I kept them and gave them a place [notchleg] for the night, because it was safer to let such things sleep, lest they be killed and become ghosts to haunt us. One night, I felt that my fate Sooner or later, a death warrant was issued to them. You can recognize them when you see this order. I used to live in the hotel where I usually live, but now I have moved to a place like a nursing home outside the city. Pay attention to this address .. I started writing this letter almost a week ago, the part before "in the course of my life", and its purpose was [prednaznachalos] to another person. Then I wrote it to you somehow, like a shy A guest in a strange house will go on and on with the relatives who brought him to the party. So please forgive me if I bore you [dokoochayou], but somehow I don't like what I see from the window Those bare branches."

Of course, the letter upset me, but it didn't worry me too much if I knew that Sebastian had been incurable since 1926 and had been getting worse for the last five years If not, I would have been more worried.I have to admit, with shame, that my natural alertness was to some extent conditioned by the idea that Sebastian was usually nervous and prone to pessimism when things went wrong.I repeat, I didn't know he had a heart attack at all, so I always reassured myself that he was sick from work.He did, however, be ill and begged me to come to him in a tone that was new to me.He never seemed to want me to be with him, but now he is asking me to come to him.It moved me, it puzzled me, and if I had known the whole truth, I would have jumped on the first train to find him.I got the letter on Thursday and immediately decided to go to Paris on Saturday so that I could be back on Sunday night, because I felt that my company didn't want me to take time off for critical business.I decided not to write and explain, but to cable him until Saturday morning, when I might find out if I could catch an earlier train.

That night, I had a very unpleasant dream.I dreamed that I was sitting in a large dimly lit room, which my dreams had hastily furnished with bits and pieces from different houses I had vaguely seen, but which were different from the original, or Odd substitutes, like that bookshelf that is also a dusty road.I had a vague feeling that the room was in a farmhouse or country tavern—the general impression was of wooden walls and floors.We're waiting for Sebastian - he's supposed to be back that day after a long trip.I was sitting on a big wooden box or something, and my mother was in the room, and there were two people drinking tea at the table we were sitting at - a man and his wife in my office, and they were stuffed Bastian didn't even know each other, they were put there by the dream manager - just because anyone could be on stage to make up the number.

We waited there anxiously, with an inexplicable sense of foreboding weighing on our hearts, I think they know better than I do, but I dare not ask my mother why she saw a bicycle that was covered in mud and couldn't fit in the cupboard Would be so worried, that the bike seemed to refuse to be tucked in, and the cupboard door was always open.There was a picture of a steamship on the wall, and the waves on it kept moving, like caterpillars crawling one after the other, and the swaying of the ship annoyed me so much—until I remembered when people were waiting for the travelers to return It is an ancient custom to always hang pictures like that.Sebastian could arrive at any moment, and the floor near the door had been sanded to keep him from slipping.My mother walked away with her muddy spurs and pedals that she had nowhere to hide, and the unrecognizable couple passed away, because I was alone in the house.Then the door of a long, narrow room upstairs flung open, and Sebastian appeared, walking slowly down the rickety flight of stairs that led directly to the room.His hair was disheveled and he had no coat: I understand, he had just slept a little after returning from a trip.As he descended the stairs, he paused between each step, always lifting the same foot for the next step, and resting his arm on the wooden banister.When he tripped and slid down on his back, my mom came back to help him up.He laughed when he came up to me, but I felt he was ashamed of something.He was pale and unshaven, but he looked happier.My mother sat down on something with a silver cup in her hand, and it turned out that she was on a stretcher, because she was soon carried away by two men who came to live here every Saturday, which is Sebastian told me with a smile.I suddenly noticed that Sebastian had a black glove on his left hand, the fingers were motionless, and he never used that hand—I was terrified, disturbed, to the point of nausea.I was afraid he might accidentally touch me with that hand, because I knew it was a prosthetic wrist-mounted hand—and I noticed he'd had surgery, or had some horrible accident.I also understood the oddity of his appearance and the general atmosphere of his arrival, but, though he might have noticed that I was shaking slightly, he went on drinking his tea.My mother came back to get the thimble she had forgotten earlier, and walked away quickly because the two men were in a hurry.Sebastian asked me if his manicurist was here because he was in a hurry to get ready for the party.I tried to avoid the subject because I couldn't bear the thought of his crippled hand.But soon I saw the whole house covered in jagged fingernails, and a girl I used to know (but she's strangely faded from my memory) came with a manicure packet and stood in front of Sebastian. sit on the stool.Sebastian told me not to look, but I couldn't help looking.I saw him undo the glove and pull it down slowly; when the glove came off, the contents spilled out—many tiny hands, like the front paws of a mouse, lavender pink and soft— Lots and lots—all fell to the floor; the girl in black knelt to the floor.I bent down to see what she was doing under the table, and she picked up those little hands and put them on the plate - I looked up, and Sebastian had disappeared, and when I bent down again, the girl disappeared too .I don't think I can stay in that room any longer.But as I turned back and felt for the latch, I heard Sebastian's voice behind me; his voice seemed to come from the darkest and farthest corner of the room that had become the great barn, Grain flowed from a sack with holes and piled up at my feet.I couldn't see him, and I was so anxious to get away that the impatience bubbling inside me seemed to drown out his words.I knew he was calling me, and said something important--and promised to tell me something more important, if I went to the corner of the room where he sat or lay, for he was weighed down by the heavy sack that fell on his feet. Can't move.I moved forward, and there came his last persistent loud plea, and he said a phrase that, when I woke up and thought about it, meant nothing, but in my sleep it clanged and brought With this absolutely instantaneous burden, and with such an obvious motive to decipher a great riddle for me, I would have run to Sebastian had I not been half awake from a dream.

I know that when you plunge your whole arm into the water, where there seems to be a jewel gleaming in the white sand, that ordinary pebble you grab out and clutch in your fist is actually a hidden gem, despite its appearance. More like pebbles dried by the daily sun.Thus, I felt that the nonsensical sentence that echoed in my waking head was actually a muddled translation revealing a remarkable truth; as I lay, listening to the familiar street sounds, Some dreadful dread made me nearly shiver with biting cold when the dull radio music from the room above me was cheering up somebody's premature breakfast, and I decided to send a telegram telling Se Bastian I'll be there that day.Out of some stupid judgment in human affairs (which in other cases is not my specialty), I thought I'd better ask the Marseilles branch of my office to see me leave Will it work for a few days?I found that not only was it not possible, but it was doubtful whether I would be able to leave for the weekend.That Friday, I came home very late after a busy day.There was a telegram waiting for me, and it came at noon—but strangely enough, the clichés of the day always prevailed and overwhelmed the subtle revelations of the dream, and I forgot the counsel the dream had spoken to me.So when I opened the telegram I just expected to see business information.

"Sebastian's condition is hopeless, come to Stalov as soon as possible." The telegram was written in French, and the "v" in Sebastian's name is the phonetic transcription of its Russian spelling; for some reason, I walked into the In the bathroom, I stood for a moment in front of the full-length mirror.Then I grabbed my hat and ran downstairs.When I arrived at the railway station, it was a quarter to twelve at night, and there was a train at two past zero, which arrived in Paris at two-thirty the next afternoon. At this moment, I realized that I didn’t bring much cash, not enough to buy a second-class ticket. For a moment, I argued with myself, wouldn’t it be better if I went back and got more money, and then caught the earliest flight to Paris?But the train was coming soon, and it was too tempting.I took advantage of the cheapest opportunity, as I have always done in my life.As soon as the train started I realized with a shock that I had forgotten Sebastian's letter on my desk and hadn't remembered the address he had given me.